horse

I fell in love with horses the way most young girls fall in love with horses — through movies, cartoons, horse figurines and even a wooden rocking horse. I couldn’t get enough. Every company picnic, I’d spend all day on the pony rides.

Needless to say, my dad knew this wasn’t a childhood phase. My mother had owned horses, and it must have been in the blood.

When we moved onto property, I was given my very first horse, and it was all over for me. A dozen years, two rodeo queen titles, and eight horses later, I’m still as obsessed, though I’m confined to city limits most days.

I now get a lot of my horse fix through blogs such as this one, which is how I’ve come to be the voice in front of you.

Since the day I started cleaning stalls at the age of 12 simply to be around horses, the horse-human connection has fascinated me. It seems to have captured quite a few folks:

Keith Templeton edits The Farrier Guideto education and employment, a resource for farriers that features a worldwide directory of horseshoeing schools, informative guides to finding the right school and working as a farrier as well as interviews with experienced farriers.

Photo by Paulina Kozlowska

With more than 25 years of experience horseshoeing, teaching, and riding, Bryan Farcus educates horse owners around the country through regular hoof care demonstrations and horse clinics. The Farrier Guide caught up with Farcus to ask him about the basics of hoof care and how horses and owners benefit from the services of a farrier.

What does a farrier do?
Today’s farrier is not necessarily your granddaddy’s blacksmith. One main reason for this is that the use of our modern day horses is one of recreation, rather than one of work. Back in the day, to shoe a horse meant that you had to produce many of the tools and shoes used from scratch. To be a farrier (shoer of the horse), you had to also be a metal/iron working specialist.(more…)

I found a pretty cool word or tag cloud tool online: Tagxedo.com. It crawls your site, Twitter account, or other web content and finds the most common words, making the popular words bigger, and then arranges them in an image. Here’s ilovehorses.net‘s word cloud at left. At Tagxedo’s Twitter feed you can find links to all kinds of creative word cloud images they’ve made.

Can you see the ilovehorses.net logo? I think it’s pretty cool. Make your own image-shaped word cloud at Tagxedo.

A farrier is a specialist who cares for horse’s feet and smiths horseshoes. The term “farrier” comes from the Latin word “ferrarius,” which means “of iron” or “blacksmith.” The etymology of the word explains why farriers are confused for blacksmiths, which they are not. Centuries ago, the village blacksmith would make items out of iron, including horseshoes, and because workers were not as specialized as they are today, the blacksmiths would also be the ones to apply those shoes to the horses.(more…)

More than simply the biography of an unusual sideshow act, Beautiful Jim Key by Mim Eichler Rivas takes a thorough look at American history from before the Civil War to the mid-20th century, examining race relations, World’s Fair and exposition history, and the development of the humane movement. The story centers around the “Arabian-Hambletonian educated horse” Beautiful Jim Key, his breeder William Key, who was a business-savvy former slave, and their promoter, Albert Rogers, a privileged young New Yorker who aspired to being a philanthropist.

A VIP pass to one of Beautiful Jim Key’s performances at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. From Beautiful Jim Key by Mim Eichler Rivas